I’ve been thinking about this essay from sci-fi author Charles Stross: They don’t make readers like they used to.
It’s a great essay about how to try and write the future at a time when it all feels ~waves hands~ like this, but it’s also specifically about readers’ understanding of what fiction is, and whether that’s changing. You should read the whole thing, but the crux of his argument is that, in the past we passively consumed a limited range of pop-culture, and now there’s been a seismic cultural shift where the expectation is that fans will interact with, question and reinterpret everything.
Anyway: fans raised on interactive media rather than the static printed page or celluloid reel of film invariably argue in their own heads with the official story lines they're handed. And they sometimes write down their alternative takes on the stories--not just happy endings in place of tragedies, or attempts to fix what they perceive as broken plots or world building, but their own stories that try to make sense of the worlds of the imagination they've been presented with. Fans who write fanfic or play games from the original adversary's point of view in hope of getting a happy ending are not fans who accept the author's privileged position as narrator for granted.
Stross describes himself as “a living fossil” who expects to define the parameters of his fictional universes. In his words, he’s the final authority in his fictional worlds.
All of this got me to thinking about my own journey through consuming fiction, and how I wound up in the transformative rather than the “fossilised” camp.
It definitely began when I was about eight years old with the Choose Your Own Adventure series. If you somehow missed the joy of these, it’s hard to explain how exciting it was to pick your path through the stories, agonising over every choice, and obviously cheating, as described in this New Yorker article (incredibly, written as a choose your own adventure):
keeping one finger marking the page at every crucial choice point to which he might need to return, until all his fingers were slotted into the book—as if he were playing it like a wind instrument.
That love of interactive fiction translated straight across to games played around the family pc (in the days before everything became a first person shooter), laboriously drawing maps of where we’d explored in Return to Zork, or sending objects back and forward in time in Day of the Tentacle.
And from there, to using the early internet to connect to LambdaMOO, where on logging in you’d be greeted with:
*** Connected ***
The Coat Closet
The closet is a dark, cramped space. It appears to be very crowded in here; you keep bumping into what feels like coats, boots, and other people (apparently sleeping). One useful thing that you’ve discovered in your bumbling about is a metal doorknob set at waist level into what might be a door.
Absolutely endless possibilities!
Stross highlights Dungeons & Dragons, computer games, and superhero movies as the “fictive seeds” for the revolution. Mine were different but the journey remains the same. I’d never really thought to connect the dots from these early interactions with malleable fiction to now, when my first instinct on encountering new media I love is to think, “I wonder if there’s good fic about this.”
Stross seems to believe that the attitude of transformative fans is that “personal taste should dictate how the story unfolds, rather than it being fixed as ink on paper is fixed”. On the contrary, I don’t think my personal taste should dictate anything. I think the freedom of transformative fandom is that it makes it possible for a story to unfold any way you choose — no need to hold your fingers in the pages of the book. And in my case, at least, it’s certainly not to chase a “happy ending”.
(Good news: choose your own adventure books are still in print)
one of the things I’m often thinking about is how we teach young people defence against the dark arts in an age where they’re receiving a literal firehose of algorithmically-driven misinformation. So it was really encouraging to read this from Teen Vogue on how media literacy is on the rise.
Lito is a Japanese artist who searched for an outlet where he could channel his ADHD when he discovered the Japanese art of kirie (切り絵, literally ‘cut picture’). Several years ago he began experimenting, not with paper, but with leaves.
A few years ago I was lucky enough to hang out with Dr Ken Lacovara, who has discovered some of the largest dinosaurs we’ve yet uncovered, including Dreadnoughtus (which, no lie, I thought was a made-up name in Jurassic Park:Dominion). He’s the executive director of the brand new Edelman Fossil Park & Museum in Mantua, NJ, which opens in March, and for which tickets are now on sale. I am seethingly jealous of every person who gets to visit this before me.
